Results of Site Redesign

About a week ago I merged Daily Bingo Cards and Bingo Card Creator, and embarked on a massive site redesign. I thought I would write a bit about how this improved my numbers. I have compared traffic to the combined total of the two sites — all other comparisons are against Bingo Card Creator itself, because I am lazy. These are not rigorously devised statistics — they’re my quick eyeball of typical statistics for a weekday.

Visitors: 900 -> 1,200

Pages per Visit: 2.5 -> 3.5

Time per visit: 90 seconds -> 150 seconds

Trial Downloads: 100 -> 125 to 150 (hasn’t settled yet)

Confirmed Application Installs: 20-25 -> 30-40 (hasn’t settled yet)

Sales: 2 -> slightly under 1.

I’m sort of at a loss as to what is causing the sales to go down. Its possible that is just natural fluctuation, as all of the pre-sales indicators are way the heck up. I also might have some folks working through the trial pipeline who remember the old branding and get turned off by the new design (“This isn’t the right site!” is a very serious worry in my market).

A graphic on how well the design focuses user attention, stolen shamelessly from my page on <a href=”http://www.bingocardcreator.com/bingo-cards/holidays/st-patrick” onclick=”javascript:_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’,’outbound-article’,’http://www.bingocardcreator.com’]);”s-day”>St. Patrick’s Day bingo</a> and courtesy of CrazyEgg (I just upgraded to their $19/month plan because I’m getting too much traffic for the $9 plan to be useful — please, God, send me more problems like that one). (This image will almost certainly be truncated by WordPress. Click to see the full sized version.)

And one more, because images are fun. Caution: this isn’t the best test in the world, because I did some significant changes to the sidebar several times while the test was running, and when element IDs change sometimes CrazyEgg “loses” the clicks from some of the views. (This is so that you don’t see big red splotches where page elements no longer exist, obviously, but it also means that most of the clicks on those buttons aren’t getting shown.)

Alright, back to my favorite Saturday activity: doing taxes! (I got the uISV part done already. It came out to a bit over $800 on $6,300 odd of profits. Now I’ve just got to collect a bunch of statements documenting less than $100 in interest and then fill out a bunch of boring administrivia forms.)

About Author

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) ran four small software businesses. He writes about software, marketing,
sales, and general business topics. Opinions here are his own.

I found a nice free icon set to spruce up my Irish bingo cards blog post, which is going to get seen by several thousand people in the next week. I figured, hey, add a cool looking image to useful content and you’ll get much better linkable action out of it. Plus, folks are much more likely to click it. Doesn’t it grip you so much more than just the text alone?

Newer

In my continuing desire to split test the heck out of everything, and my continuing total inability to graphically design to save my life, I went back to the LogoSamurai folks and got some buttons designed for the website as drop-in replacements of my current ones. I’m also getting some made by my web designer Gursimran, and will be testing the two against each other (and, of course, against the current set) and keeping the ones which are most successful at driving the conversions.

Who am I?

My name is Patrick McKenzie (better known as patio11 on the Internets.)